I think the issue here is precisely the concept of package management, as well as the currently used implementations on Linux. Package management is curated by people not involved in the original source packages, and the maintainers of the original open source projects do not do releases into the package management repositories.
And due to the proliferation of package management systems, choosing the right packages from a project's web page is quite confusing. In addition, rpm and dpkg have absolutely horrid command line interfaces, and the documentation is about as confusing as bash's man page. These are not trivial or easy to understand tools, necessitating further layers of abstraction like yum and apt. However, even these "simple" interfaces expose a huge amount of unnecessary complexity. If you disagree, look at the number of command line options in the rpm and dpkg utilities, and the strange and unexpected way that these command line options interact. It's not a clean system at its core. Suppose I want to do something extremely simple such as list all the packages installed on my system, how many words of the man page do I have to read and re-read before I can discover this interface? These tools share none of the simplicity of original Unix utilities, and are large monolithic beasts rather than composable units.
Linux package management is truly awesome, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have faults and that it can't be improved.
apt-* and yum are only minorly better than rpm and dpkg, and are still ridiculously over-complicated. The proliferation of extra tools to deal with package management are a testament to the number of people that are unhappy with the current options.
I guess I really don't feel you. 'yum localinstall' is absurdly simple as far as I am concerned, and the standard 'yum install' is obviously even simpler. I am not even aware of any additional arguments localinstall takes. If there are any, I have never used them.
Edit: I just checked the manpage, and it seems 'localinstall' is deprecated. Simply using 'install' now does what it used to, though 'localinstall' still works for backwards compatibility. It really could not become any simpler.
Complaining that 'rpm' is complicated is like using git without the porcelain then complaining that it is complicated.
And due to the proliferation of package management systems, choosing the right packages from a project's web page is quite confusing. In addition, rpm and dpkg have absolutely horrid command line interfaces, and the documentation is about as confusing as bash's man page. These are not trivial or easy to understand tools, necessitating further layers of abstraction like yum and apt. However, even these "simple" interfaces expose a huge amount of unnecessary complexity. If you disagree, look at the number of command line options in the rpm and dpkg utilities, and the strange and unexpected way that these command line options interact. It's not a clean system at its core. Suppose I want to do something extremely simple such as list all the packages installed on my system, how many words of the man page do I have to read and re-read before I can discover this interface? These tools share none of the simplicity of original Unix utilities, and are large monolithic beasts rather than composable units.
Linux package management is truly awesome, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have faults and that it can't be improved.